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Tuesday, 27 October 2015

'Conversing With The Dead': An Interview with Lee Dorrian

By: Phil Weller

"Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt." William Allingham

With The Dead
are no super group. This is no get-rich-quick scheme, gimmick or marketing
ploy. As Lee Dorrian says himself, this is just the sound of three blokes
making “the most uncompromising, oppressive and most crushing record we
possibly could. That was the only rule from the start.”

Indeed, the nature of the band does cry ‘super group’ – with the ex-Cathedral/Napalm
Death bellower fronting the filthiest rhythm section in existence with Mark Greening (drums) and Tim Bagshaw
(on guitars and bass), who need no introduction on the hallowed pages of The Sludgelord. And yes, this is an Avengers fashioned ensemble of well-known and deeply admired
characters within the doom scene, but their birth was not forced through any
form of heroic gesture. It just made sense.

“I
think it’s a bit of a ridiculous term myself but people will call us that.
That’s fine. We’re just a bunch of underground kids really, it’s not like any
of us have had any major success. None of us have been in fucking Gun N’ Roses, we’ve just sold a few records across
the world over the last 20/30 years. If you want to be successful then you
wouldn’t have written a record as heavy as this.”

With regards to the band’s beginnings, Dorrian
explains that he was never intended to be a member as the Ramesses twosome first got together to make some noise.

“Obviously
Tim and Mark go back a long way, and they’ve been playing in Ramesses together for years. Then Mark had the
whole drama with Electric Wizard a year and
a half ago and found himself without a band. So they just talked about having a
jam and seeing if they came up with anything, it was as loose as that at first. “Tim
contacted me to see that, if they did get something together, would I be
interested in releasing the stuff through Rise Above. I’ve always been a fan of their work
so of course I was interested and asked to be kept updated. There was no
intention of me being involved in the band. “Eventually
they sent over a few demo tracks and I instantly thought that it sounded great;
it was unpretentious, heavy and raw, with big fuck off riffs.”

But things didn’t play out like a drearily
fucked up version of some fairy-tale. A year ago the band found themselves
demoing tracks in Dorset, but as much as Lee “loved
the tracks,”he felt that “the
recordings didn’t do them any justice.”

He illustrates: “So instead of panicking to get
something out there, step back for six months, come back to it with fresh ears
and start again from scratch. By this point I’d already agreed to do vocals. So
during that time we had chance for the songs to sink in a bit more. Once we had
the focal point of writing the heaviest songs we could everything became a lot
easier. There are few times in your career when you can be that channelled into
an idea and all be on the same page. We were just totally focused in making
the most brutal record we could. There wasn’t any messing around with
experimentalism.

“This
was the easiest record I’ve ever done to be honest. I did all the vocals in
about two hours; we just kept the first takes. In Cathedral I’d spend weeks and weeks and weeks on
just one line so that it just looked right on paper. I had no social life, I’d
torture myself. It was so liberating to get away from that and sort of do
something off the wall.”

As dismissive as he is of the super group label
slapped across this band by excited fans and media types, he is aware of the
resulting factors of this collaboration. It’s a branding akin to the ‘as seen on TV’ found on many books and
albums, as retailers scramble for a unique selling point. In the band’s
situation however, the desire is for the music to speak for itself and not
depend on notoriety like a new born baby suckling its mother.

Since founding Rise AboveRecords however, his perspective and understanding of what
can so often be a cut throat industry has marked his actions.

“I
make no bones about it; it’s very easy having myself, Mark and Tim together in
a band. It’s made things more instantly recognisable and marketable. Things are
gonna be easier for us due to that fact we’re recognised musicians. People
might say that we got together because it’s easy for us to sell a lot of
records, I can see why people would say these things, but what are we supposed
to do, not do it because we were worried about what people might think?

“[Because
of that] people are obviously gonna have expectations of us three being
together. There’s a big burden of responsibility that comes with that. That’s
why I didn’t want to rush anything after hearing those initial demos.
Consequences are something I think about with the label every day. One false
move and that could be the label done for, so I have to be very careful. I
don’t know if that’s a business perspective or just a caring perspective. I
wouldn’t be in this band if I thought the music was just average – what would
be the point?”

After reconvening six months after those first
sessions together, the band’s chemistry exploded. What they now have – and what
we, the public can now gleefully drown within – is by far one of the most
gut-wrenching albums of 2015. It belies a choking sense of gravity, the sheer
weight of each song as unrelenting as it is personalised by the three lauded
souls who have breathed life into these compositions.

“It’s fucking killer,” he
gushes. “Tim and Mark are just awesome really. I think on this record they’ve
really excelled themselves. The production is very raw and abrasive and I think
it captures them in the best way; this is the best they’ve ever sounded.
There’s a fine line between making the record sounding garagey and too polished
– to have it intense and heavy while still audible.

“Hopefully
it just sounds like a genuine record. We wanted to put as much as ourselves and
relate to it as personally as we could. You don't have to be original to make
good music. Just put your soul into it. If it’s not pretentious it’s gonna
sound fresh because there’s only one you. I mean, on the grand scale of our
existence as people rock n’ roll is still relatively new. Too many people are
trying to reinvent the wheel, but you just have to be yourself. As long as it
sounds like you.”

As a short but damnably sour body of work – from
‘The Cross’’ towering cacophonous
grit, which sounds like a nastier Uncle Acid at times, to
the slow motion earthquake of ‘I Am Your
Virus,’ capped by a dominant performance from Dorrian – this self-titled
offering is hard to fault. It breathes honesty and integrity, reflecting the
hearts and minds behind the music.

The question on everybody’s lips right now, and
quite naturally too, is what happens next?

“There’s
no big masterplan for this band. It’s a major relief to have the music finished
and out there but with everything else we’re just taking things as they come.
Hopefully we’ll do some shows next year and another record. I don’t want this
to be another studio project that doesn’t do anything. Personally I think this record
is too good to just leave it and there’s more stuff that we can do. I’d like to
think that this isn’t a one off.

Obviously
in a live scenario Tim’s gonna be playing guitar so we’ll have to find a
bassist, maybe a second guitarist. So there’s a lot to think about but we’re
not ruling anything out.”

And with that, The Sludgelord
can hear the echoic clamour of thousands of prayers hoping that this band is
here to stay, and not just a flash in the pan, not just an adrenalised and
inspired meeting of much revered minds. Amen!!

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